Profile of Kathryn Graybill & Assaf Rutenberg
A NYC soup kitchen and homeless shelter
benefits from a pair of practical altruists
By Peter Aronson
The Practical Altruism Project
Published on September 23, 2024
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Kathryn Graybill and Assaf Rutenberg have two things very much in common.
They are free spirits, having taken bold chances in their careers, lived in far-flung places and devoted themselves to truly living life to the fullest.
The other thing they have in common is that they both are practical altruists, now applying the specific skills they honed in their work careers over decades as essential volunteers at Broadway Community, a soup kitchen and homeless shelter in the Morningside Heights section of New York City, just down the street from Columbia University.
They are two very different people, from different places in the world, with different skills and backgrounds, yet both have discovered Broadway Community as a place where they are able to use their expertise to help New Yorkers in need.
They are the first two individuals I am profiling as I launch The Practical Altruism Project. The project is simple and singularly focused: I am profiling individuals who are now using the skills they learned in their careers as key volunteers at a nonprofit. The goal is to spread the word about practical altruism, with the hope that it will encourage others to get involved.
As I do research and conduct interviews, I have learned that no two practical altruists are alike. They come from all walks of life, with as many skills as the job market offers. And they apply their skills to help others in different ways, with some PAs working one to one with those in need, while others work behind the scenes to help nonprofits, assisting with fundraising and board governance issues.
(I have come to appreciate Graybill’s and Rutenberg’s contributions because I also volunteer at Broadway Community and am a member of its board of directors.)
For Graybill, it’s a story about how a Shakespearian actress developed grant-writing skills through nonprofit theater management and how she has now transferred this skill to writing much-needed grant applications for Broadway Community.
For Rutenberg, it’s a story about how an IT specialist with decades of experience has now developed and opened a computer lab at Broadway Community that helps guests connect to jobs, benefits, housing and the wider internet world.
They are two practical altruists volunteering at a time-honored institution. Broadway Community, begun by members of Broadway Presbyterian Church and students from Columbia University and the Union Theological Seminary, began operation as a community lunch program in 1982. Since its inception, it’s been located in the church’s basement on Broadway and 114th Street. (The church itself has been in the community since 1912.) While Broadway Community has experienced its ups and downs, it has been revitalized and in 2023, the facility served more than 50,000 meals and provided, collectively, more than 5,000 nights of safe shelter to scores of homeless individuals.
Graybill and Rutenberg are two of the individuals who help make Broadway Community tick. Here are their stories:
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Kathryn Graybill’s relationship with Broadway Community stretches back almost 50 years
Kathryn Graybill’s practical altruistic work at Broadway Community flows directly from her love of theater, devotion to Shakespeare and her struggling-actor life from the mid-1970’s on.
In the 70s, she was a young woman from Enid, Oklahoma (and later from England, Chicago, Wisconsin and points in between), struggling to make it on Broadway, like thousands of other talented actors then and now. In between auditions and off-off Broadway gigs, she waited tables, worked as a bank teller and legal secretary, collected bills (over the phone), painted and plastered apartments, served summonses … and worked as a secretary and clerk for the Broadway Presbyterian Church’s university pastor.
While working at the church, Graybill got her first taste with grant applications, helping the church seek funds for its visiting scholar program.
Graybill was not aware at the time, but that learning experience would impact her career years down the road.
Graybill never made it to Broadway, but as an Equity and SAG/AFTRA member, she loved her acting career, particularly Shakespeare.
In the mid-1980s, she and her husband, Anthony, moved from New York to Dallas to get their MFAs in theater at Southern Methodist University, one of the finest theater programs in the country. This led to years of stage acting around the country for Graybill and directing for Anthony. Graybill’s highlights included playing Miranda in The Tempest at the Colorado Shakespeare Festival in Boulder, playing the Earl of Kent in King Lear at the Theatre 54 in New York City and playing Juliet in Romeo and Juliet at the Fort Worth Shakespeare Festival.
“Well, everyone wants to play Juliet as she basically grows up 20 years in the course of the play and has to move from ebullient, passionate love through despair into courage to go along with the Friar’s sleeping potion plan, and then what? What makes one commit suicide?”
The couple kept working in theater in various parts of the country until 1999, when her husband, out of the blue, was offered a job directing Julius Caesar at the Globe Theatre in Odessa, Texas, a theater modeled after Shakespeare’s Globe in London. Her husband took the job directing, Graybill soon joined the theater’s acting troupe, and within a relatively short time, they were running the theater. They and the theater’s board had a vision to expand the theater’s offerings to include a summer Shakespeare festival. But with only a $100,000 budget, they needed additional funds. When the part-time grant writers left, Graybill knew she needed to step in.
She learned on the job. She studied the theater’s past grant applications, seeing they had applied for grants that were unrealistically too large for such a small nonprofit. She went to nonprofit conferences, read books about grant writing and visited the local nonprofit management center. She spoke to people in the field and soon she was writing grant applications, seeking money in the sweet spot for a small, Texas-based Shakespearean theater company. They began earning grants ranging from $5,000 to $25,000, bringing in the extra funds needed to help make the theater viable for the vision she and her husband had, including more quality Shakespeare with Equity actors. In 2009, she applied for a $25,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. “When the letter came awarding the grant, I burst into tears,” she said.
For almost 10 years, they produced high-quality Shakespeare that got good reviews and drew theater crowds and tourist dollars to their boom-or-bust oil town. They even got invited to a Shakespearian birthday dinner at the White House. But the good times didn’t last.
Graybill’s husband got sick. The board lost interest. So, fast forward to June 2018. Anthony had passed away, and Graybill was now back in New York City, living in Morningside Heights. She reconnected with Broadway Presbyterian Church, her house of worship, and with Broadway Community. She had been a board member decades earlier, but the facility had changed. She rejoined the board and began getting to know the soup kitchen again, working as a volunteer, studying the organization’s finances. The organization’s budget at the time was approximately $500,000, with much of it coming from the city. They needed more sources and more money to operate.
“I realized they had very little organized fundraising,” she said. So she got the go-ahead from the board to put her grant writing skills to use, seeking much needed funds for Broadway Community at a time when the organization was dealing with the impact of the epidemic and trying to meet the community’s growing needs.
She viewed an online search engine for nonprofits, where she sought local grants for food pantries, soup kitchens and homeless shelters in New York City. She took online grant writing courses. She studied the application process, and she read the book The Only Grant-Writing Book You’ll Ever Need, by Ellen Karsh and Arlen Sue Fox.
She eventually found a “whole slew” of options, she said.
Her peak year, so far, was 2022, when she applied for about 20 grants and received approximately 10, totaling $130,000. She noticed the difference seeking grants in New York City for social services than for a theater in Texas.
“Why do you need money for a play?” is not a question she hears now, she said.
Broadway Community Executive Director Isaac Adlerstein said Graybill is responsible for obtaining hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants in the last few years and opening doors to other money as the budget has almost tripled to $1.4 million for 2024.
“Kathryn helped us unlock a lot of that money,” Adlerstein said. “I know for certain we wouldn’t be where we are today without the work she has done.”
With the increased funds, the paid staff has grown from 14 to 23 (5 full-time, 11 part-time and 7 interorganizational with the church), the number of meals served annually has risen from a little more than 21,000 to more than 50,000 and services added include the computer lab, benefits enrollment assistance, supportive counseling, job assistance and housing navigation.
And the extra money raised has a snowball effect, Adlerstein explained, because it helps unlock even more funding options for Broadway Community. This occurs because once nonprofits have a budget of more than $1 million, they are required to have an audit, which, in turn, attracts more funding options because many sources won’t fund a nonprofit without an audit.
“Kathryn has identified some great funders” through this process, Adlerstein said, ticking off the names of family foundations that are now making annual donations ranging in amounts from $15,000 to $50,000.
He also credited her with teaching him a lot about the grant-writing process and with playing an overall leadership role at Broadway Community as a longtime board member and active volunteer. He said her work as an actor is an important reason why she’s such a valuable contributor.
“As a theater professional, she learned choreography, how to work with teams and various characters and how to get everyone to work cohesively together,” he said. “So Kathryn has applied these skills as a steady source of leadership at Broadway Community. When new volunteers come on board, she’s able to orient them … and get things up and running.”
Graybill said her life’s work has helped her contribute, particularly as a grant writer.
“I think by nature, I’m just a person who is observant. You have to be very observant to be an actor. You have to watch people. And I think that one of the most important qualities of a grant writer is that you really need to spend time on a funder’s website, trying to work your way into their brain. So you know who the audience is and what they want. I think I’ve learned how to find out who my audience is by being an actor and a director.”
Assaf Rutenberg is a tech guru with a pink goatee and a huge heart
Assaf Rutenberg’s path to Broadway Community began in Israel, where he was born, then zig zagged through Europe and throughout the United States, where he lived his formative years, before making a pit stop in a small town in upstate New York, where a career-shaping skill began to flourish. In the early 1990s, Rutenberg settled in as a student at Skidmore College, in Saratoga Springs, New York, doing work study in the school’s computer center, earning extra money to get through college.
He realized he had an aptitude for tech, so he continued working there during his four years in college, assisting students and helping manage the school’s growing computer center.
From this beginning, Rutenberg, now 54, embarked on a peripatetic career in tech, working for such companies as Staples, Bradlees Department Store and the Boston Herald, helping build and manage their tech departments. Working with consultants or providers, he assisted B. Altman, Sports Illustrated, Barnes & Noble and Morgan Stanley with tech innovation and support.
“I was always terrible with authority, which is probably why I went from job to job,” Rutenberg explained.
He worked at Metalmark Capital, a private equity company that manages billions of dollars, managing their IT, making “spectacular money,” including an “extravagant” sum to just to stay on for a few extra weeks after the company downsized.
But corporate clearly was not Rutenberg’s scene.
After all, he’s a guy who now has a pink goatee, who alternates its colors from blue to orange to purple to green on a whim, who has the laid back feel of a surfer dude, who also is fluent in Spanish and Hebrew. While working in tech for approximately 30 years, he took gap years to backpack and hitchhike in India and to dive off the coast of an island few have heard of and probably fewer have visited, Koh Tau, a blue lagoon paradise in the Chumphon Archipelago, off the coast of Thailand. Along the way, he met his wife, Stephanie, who joined him in underwater diving.
They eventually moved to Ecuador where, Rutenberg said, from 2014 to 2021, “We lived the good life” in gorgeous, mountainous settings, in the city of Cuenca, the “Athens of Ecuador,” high in the Andes Mountains, and in Banos de Agua Santa, a small town known as the “gateway to the Amazon.” Rutenberg taught tech classes for children, introducing them to Raspberry Pi’s, extremely inexpensive computer devices that gave kids and families much-needed access to the internet.
“This opened up a whole new world for them, and I was glad to be part of this,” he said.
After his wife passed away in Ecuador, Rutenberg returned to the United States and to New York.
He found himself lost, depressed at his wife’s passing. “I just sat in my apartment and stared at the wall,” he said. “I didn’t want to do anything.”
But in Rutenberg’s case, despair had a silver lining.
In 2022, a friend pointed him to a volunteer posting on volunteermatch.org by Broadway Community. Rutenberg met with Adlerstein, Broadway Community’s new executive director at the time, and they discussed the need to open a computer lab in their basement site, in a room renovated by and equipped with computers by Columbia University.
Rutenberg clearly had the skills needed and the desire to contribute, Adlerstein said, and “We bonded over the fact that we both were raised in Orthodox Jewish families.”
“I thought this would be a great opportunity to use my skills to help others,” Rutenberg said.
So he did. He rebuilt the computers so they had consistent operating systems and brought in a printer, a scanner, spare parts and accessories on his own dime, and got the lab up and running by January 2023, when Broadway Community resumed indoor dining following the pandemic.
Adlerstein proposed opening the lab one day a week, he said, but Rutenberg wanted three days (now expanded to four days), when guests are in the facility for lunch. That was even better, Adlerstein said, citing Rutenberg’s passion for the work.
Since opening, scores of guests who either live in a shelter, live on the streets, or are just putting their lives back together after experiencing trauma or job loss have gotten help in the lab.
“I feel extraordinarily fortunate that I can do this,” Rutenberg said, explaining that he’s financially stable without a paying job, because he’s on disability (He has a degenerative nerve disorder, which prevents him from having a regular job in tech) and lives in a rent-controlled apartment.
And Rutenberg is also responsible for helping train an individual who was a volunteer and is now a part-time paid staffer who helps supervise the computer lab. This individual was overcoming trauma himself and Rutenberg has helped him get his bearings.
The lab is now open four days a week, 10-2, providing assistance.
“We have an extraordinary range of needs,” Rutenberg said, explaining that individuals need to apply for or check on government benefits (Medicare, Medicaid, SNAP, Social Security, etc.), set up online accounts, apply for jobs or housing, get a city ID, write a resume, or as simple as learn how to use email, a computer or a cell phone, or just get access to the internet to read, get information or watch a TV show or movie.
Adlerstein said Rutenberg’s work is essential to the services provided at Broadway Community, particularly assisting guests with applications for work and benefits.
“I don’t think we’d be able to provide the robust employment assistance work that we do without Assaf,” Adlerstein said, because Rutenberg is the one who started the computer lab. He said Rutenberg, as well as the other individual working in the computer lab, help guests create resumes from scratch and help these guests navigate job search websites like Indeed and Glassdoor.
“They are dealing with folks with a variety of technical proficiencies,” Adlerstein explained. “With folks who have varying work experiences, with a population that, generally speaking, is often high need. Rutenberg meets with people, one on one, listens patiently to them, helps them get their resumes on paper, helps them create cover letters and then helps identify and apply for jobs that the folks are qualified for.”
He said in the past year, Rutenberg has helped about 10 people find work, including a Navy veteran, who found a job as a salvage diver in South Dakota, and a number of people in the food service industry.
“The important thing that we do is make people feel like they’re important or that they’re not any less important than anyone else,” Rutenberg said.
Through this process, Rutenberg has learned a lot about humanity, how simple kindness makes a difference. There was the female writer who had been through tough times and who loved technology, so Rutenberg gave her a refurbished Microsoft folding phone, and the man who had his laptop stolen, a tool that served as his major lifeline to the outside world, so Rutenberg gave him an old laptop he had bought on eBay and refurbished.
The woman had the “biggest smile on her face” and the man now “comes in every day and gives me a hug,” Rutenberg said, smiling, clearly feeling good about what he’s doing.
And then there’s the woman who used to sit in a corner, alone, staring at her phone, talking to herself. But one day she eyed an egg that Rutenberg was eating. She liked eggs, she told him. Now he brings in two eggs, one for each of them. “And so I’ve gotten her to talk to me and she gets very excited because every day I bring in an egg. I mean, what does it cost me, 50 cents and it puts a huge smile on her face.”
Rutenberg’s emotional payoff: “I focus a lot less on what I don’t have and more on how fortunate I am to have what I do have,” he said. “It has allowed me to use my technical background, combined with my interpersonal skills, to help make people’s lives a little bit better. I don’t think it’s revolutionary. I don’t think I’m changing their lives in some enormous fashion, but I get people to smile. I give them an email address, get them a little connectivity. Some of them have gotten onto Facebook and reconnected with family, so I am making people’s lives a little bit better. And that’s enough, because I feel like the society as a whole is just crumbling and things are not getting better. So I focus my abilities on making things better on a small scale. Dealing with people, one on one, is a wonderful experience. My life is much better for it.”
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Rutenberg and Graybill are just part of the volunteer team providing service at Broadway Community. Adlerstein estimates that there are four other practical altruists among the more than 1,100 individuals who volunteer at Broadway Community each year. To read more about Broadway Community, click BroadwayCommunity.org.